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By Root 631 0

and sometimes it doesn’t. At the basement level of reality, there are just probabilities. In the last 30 years, physicists have increasingly been able to translate the randomness and indeterminism of the subatomic particles into weird quantum behavior by tabletop-sized apparatus so that it can be detected on the laboratory bench. Since the big bang is just such a quantum event, it, too, is a wholly indeterministic one. It is an event that just springs up out of the multiverse’s foam of universes without any cause at all. Why is there a universe at all? No reason at all. Why is there a multiverse in which universes pop into existence for no reason at all? No reason at all! It’s just another quantum event. What science and scientism tell those who hanker for more is “Get over it!”

Dissatisfaction with this answer is practically built into our genes. As Chapter 1 sketched and Chapters 5–7 will make clear, conspiracy theorizing was bred in our bones. That makes it difficult to accept the right answer to the “Why is there something rather than nothing” question. Combine the psychologically natural refusal to take “No reason” for an answer and the fact that physics faces the prospect of a regress of ever more prior causes and ever more fundamental particles, and the question gets asked with increasing urgency: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Into the vacuum of psychologically satisfying answers to this question steps the Goldilocks theory, aka the anthropic principle. Why did the multiverse come into being? So that the universe could come into being. Why did the universe come into being? In order to produce us. And of course we know who arranged matters this way, blessed be his name. The universe was brought into existence and arranged to be hospitable to man . . . uh, make that humans. Whence the name anthropic principle. It’s also called the Goldilocks theory because it cites as evidence for the presence of purpose in the universe’s existence the fact that the basic physical constants of our universe are “just right” for us. If the constants are just right for human life, they must have been arranged that way on purpose. The gravitational constant, the strength of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, the charge on the electron are not too strong, not too weak, but “just right”—fine-tuned to make human life as we know it possible. Had they been even slightly different, we couldn’t have happened. And that’s the evidence for the anthropic principle, for the theory that there is something rather than nothing owing to some very, very, very powerful agent’s purposes, plans, or designs. (The universe and multiverse turn out to be a conspiracy of one.)

Physics ruled out this sort of reasoning right at the start of its success. Ever since physics hit its stride with Newton, it has excluded purposes, goals, ends, or designs in nature. It firmly bans all explanations that are teleological (from the Greek telos, meaning “end” or “goal” or “purpose” that some process aims at or is good at achieving). At each of the obstacles to its development, physics could have helped itself to purpose or design. No explanation of heat in Newton’s laws? God must have added heat in separately. Why do electric fields produce magnetic fields and vice versa? God’s clever design. Gravity is so mysterious, the way it moves through total vacuums at infinite speed and penetrates any barrier at all. How come? God made it that way to keep us from floating away from the ground.

Theories about purposes at work in the universe could have gotten physics off the hook every time it faced a challenge. But physicists have always refused to shirk the hard work of crafting theory that increases explanatory precision and predictive application. Since Newton 350 years ago, it has always succeeded in providing a nonteleological theory to deal with each of the new explanatory and experimental challenges it has faced. That track record is tremendously strong evidence for concluding that its still-unsolved problems will submit to nonteleological theories.